Tom Verducci has a nice long profile of Earl Weaver in the current edition of SI:

As we are watching this 21st-century game in Fort Lauderdale, I ask Weaver if he has ever heard of moneyball.

“Moneyball?” he says, bewildered. “No.”

I tell him it’s shorthand for how Oakland gained a competitive edge by understanding, among many other things, the value of on-base percentage. “Ohhhhh, wait … a … minute!” Weaver bellows. “That was my favorite right there, on-base percentage! Don Buford wasn’t getting to play under Hank Bauer [Weaver’s predecessor]. He’d get in a ball game every now and then and feel like he had to get three or four hits. I told Buford, ‘I’m willing to play you as long as you have a .400 on-base percentage.’ All of a sudden he becomes a regular, and he’s walking a hundred times and hitting right around .300.” Buford had played 669 career games before Weaver was named Orioles manager on July 11, 1968. His OBP was .335. He played 617 games over the rest of his career, all for Weaver. His OBP under Weaver was .388.

Before Moneyball, before Beane, before Bill James—but not quite before Copernicus—Weaver, a white-haired gnome who never played a day of major league baseball, knew what worked. The most recent generation of general managers, armed with their computer printouts and Ivy League–educated assistants, all channel something from the Earl of Baltimore.

“I’ll tell you one thing he did that we all learned from,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein says. “He would develop arms on the big league level by bringing up a young pitcher and putting him in the bullpen, mostly out of long relief. Once he got some experience he could move into the rotation. The Twins did it with [Johan] Santana to perfection.”

And Now For Something Completely Different…

In case you’ve missed Ron Artest’s tribute to Michael Jackson, well, you just shouldn’t miss it. Bless him, Ron Ron’s heart is in the right place, but this clip ranks up there with Jesus is My Friend as the 3,653rd reason why You Tube is too good to be true.

The first person that came to mind when I heard that Steve McNair was dead was his wife. And not just because he was found in a car with his mistress. It was because of an old episode of HBO Real Sports I recall watching. McNair’s wife talked about the anxiety she had watching her husband play hurt repeatedly over the years. She came across as loving and sympathetic.

Now this.

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra had a nice, brief appreciation of McNair:

One of my mentors, Jerry Izenberg, who recently retired after more than half a century of sportswriting for the Newark Star-Ledger, offered me a nugget of wisdom: “If you’re in this business long enough,” he said, “you learn that if you’re a sportswriter — a serious, dedicated full-time newspaperman — then you don’t have a job. What you’ve got is a mistress.

“And mistresses make demands. You’ll pay for her one way or another. I paid her price in tons of coffee gulped on the run from plastic cups and in holidays spent away from my family while I was on the road. Mostly, though, I paid her price in loss of innocence through exposure to the evil side of sports in America.”

…There are some, for instance columnist Jay Mariotti of Fanhouse.com, to whom the circumstances of McNair’s death provide “a lesson to all of us about the differences between a façade and reality.” But McNair’s career was a reality, not a facade, and so were the hundreds of hours of commitment he gave to community service. The hours he and his wife spent loading food, water and clothes onto trucks for Hurricane Katrina victims (McNair himself arranged for the tractor trailers) and the three children’s football camps he personally paid for this year weren’t façades.

His death was a shock, and the manner of it cost me innocence I didn’t know I still had. But it didn’t take more from me than Steve McNair’s life and career gave back.

CC Sabathia allowed a run on three hits over seven innings last night and had more than plenty of run support as the Yanks pounded the Twins 10-2. Carlos Gomez robbed Alex Rodriguez of a grand slam and the game still wasn’t even close.

Photo by Jim Mone/AP courtesy of ESPN.com.

Every starter in the Yankee line-up got a hit. Mark Teixeira, who has been struggling offensively, had four, Brett Gardner had three, and Robbie Cano and Frankie Cervelli each had a couple. With Jose Molina set to come off a rehab assignment, Cervelli will return to Triple A.  But he sure has been fun to watch, eh?

Oh, and Alfredo Aceves will take Chien-Ming Wang’s turn and start tomorrow afternoon.

While much of the country is glued to their computer screens and TV sets watching the Michael Jackson memorial in what already seems to be an endless mourning (cashing in) period, here is the irrespressible Charles Pierce on the return of Manny Ramirez:

I thought the hype ladled onto Manny’s return was excessive, even by ESPN’s elephantine standards for excess. (I mean, honestly, breaking into ESPNews for every minor league at-bat? What if there had been a sudden fantasy-baseball emergency somewhere?) That’s Bonds treatment. Or A-Rod. I always thought Manny Ramirez was a notch below them as a subject for hyperpituitary voyeurism. However, it was of a piece with Manny’s greatest gift as a professional athlete—his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it’s Manny’s who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives.

…At his best—not as a hitter but as a public person—Manny Ramirez always has been most valuable in his ability to be a walking (if an occasionally completely unwitting) satire on baseball’s pretensions, which sorely need to be mocked on a very regular basis. He worked to fashion himself into one of the most feared hitters in the game. By any reasonable standard, he has “respected his talent” a hell of a lot more than did, say, Mickey Mantle, who left too many of his best days on a barstool in Manhattan. Without ever being completely aware of it, he spoofed the whole notion of baseball “professionalism,” which should have been left a bleached pile of bones by the side of the road back in 1970, when Jim Bouton published Ball Four. He was more than a flake. Flakes—like Bill Lee or Moe Drabowsky—generally are aware that they’re flakes. They glory in it. Manny is something sui generis—as natural and instinctive an eccentric as he is a hitter.

When Deron Johnson died in 1992, the notion of baseball mortality really started to hit me. Oh, I had already been assaulted with the tragic mid-career losses of Roberto Clemente and Thurman Munson, but their deaths had occurred while I was still a child, when I still didn’t fully appreciate life and death. By the time that Johnson died, I was 27 years old and working fulltime. Here was a guy I remembered well from my earliest days watching baseball. Deron was strong, sizeable, and seemingly unconquerable.

A burly right-handed slugger who won the National League’s RBI title in 1965 with the Cincinnati Reds, Johnson died in the spring of ‘92 while still employed as the batting coach of the California Angels. Johnson, only 53, had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous June. After the diagnosis, Johnson asked the Angels’ beat writers not to mention his illness in print. He continued to coach while carrying an oxygen task with him. For those player and coaches who knew him, such toughness was typical of Johnson. Even after he became too ill to coach, he continued to refuse hospitalization and treatment because he wanted to live out his remaining days at home. Once again, for those who knew him, such a decision typified a family man like Johnson.

Throughout his career, Johnson struck a gruff, intimidating pose. (Like Alex Karras in Blazing Saddles, he once punched a horse, which had kicked him.) In reality, Johnson was a soft touch, a likeable man who developed a close rapport with teammates, and later as a coach, with his hitting pupils. Johnson was so well liked, by both players and front office types, that the Philadelphia Phillies once dealt him to the Oakland A’s as a way of helping him earn a World Series ring. Phillies president Paul Owens received only minor league utilityman Jack Bastable, a non-prospect who would never make the majors, in return from the A’s. Owens could have held out for more, but he wanted to send Johnson to Oakland, where he would have a better chance to play in his first World Series.

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PBS has been airing re-runs of the great Jacques Pepin and Julia Child show, Jacques and Julia. Last night, Em and I watched their beef episode. Emily watched in horror while I was greatly amused–both at Jacques and Julia as well as Emily’s reaction.

It’s incredible how much filming food has changed in recent times (it looks so much better now). Anyhow, you can’t ask for more than these two, who genuinely liked each other. They just got together, drank wine, and cooked. They let the editors piece it together into a show. Some poor writer had to watch each episode and piece together the recipes because J & J made them up on the spot.

In his seminal essay Comedy’s Greatest Era, written for Life magazine, the critic James Agee wrote of Buster Keaton:

Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t he realzie he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occured to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Agee went on to describe Keaton as having a “mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances.” Remind you of anyone we know? How about our man Rivera. In his latest column for SI.com, Joe Posnanski writes:

His career almost ended before it began, and he was almost traded (twice) before the Yankee pinstripes looked right on him. On the field, he has triumphed under the most intense glare in American sports. Off the field, he has been quiet to the sound of invisible. And all the while, he has looked calm, stunningly calm, the sort of superhuman calm that Hollywood gives its heroes.

Yes, if there is an expression that conveys the Yankee myth, it would be the countenance of Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning.

This picture was drawn by an illustrator named Larry Roibal who keeps the most fantastic blog of his drawings.

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I watched Sunday’s Yankee game out of the corner of one eye. It was a turgid, ugly game that thankfully ended with the Yanks on top, 10-8. Alex Rodriguez was given the day off but Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui provided the thunder. Joba Chamberlain, on the other hand, pitched a dog of a game (even if just three of the eight runs scored on his watch were earned), and didn’t make it out of the fourth inning. The Yanks led 4-0, trailed 8-4, and then came back, thanks to dingers by Matsui and Jeter. Alfredo Aceves gets props over here for his four excellent innings of work. Mariano Rivera, Phil Hughes and Phil Coke were not available, so Aceves finished the game and earned the save.

The win keeps the Yanks just a game behind the Red Sox. New York has the second best record in the league, third best in baseball.

I couldn’t properly concentrate on the game because I was still trying to calm down after watching the entire Wimbledon final. My nerves were shot. Last year’s five-set match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal was epic. Yesterday’s match, which saw Federer out-last Andy Roddick in the longest fifth set in Wimbledon history–a freakish 16 games to 14!–has to be in the discussion of the best matches in the tournaments long history.

As it stands, Roddick played the game of his life…and lost. I thought he’d pull it out. I thought Federer, who had a career-high 50 aces, would fold. Instead, Federer won his 15th major in style. Simply put, it was greatness defined, an absolutely exquisite sporting experience.

Yanks look to stay hot this afternoon against the Jays. It is a blazing summer day here in New York.  Joba is on the hill for the New Yorkers. He will look to be more efficient this time around.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if Venus and Serena Williams were men, they’d be a whole lot more popular than they are, right? Is that what it is? That they are women? Is it tennis? Or is it that they are black? Or perhaps because they are not cutie-pies, known to be ungracious in defeat, or because their old man is as unappealing as they come? Are they just not likable? Or maybe it’s because their personal rivalry is without much drama. The sisters love each other and while they have different personalities–Venus is elegant yet removed, Serena, effusive, with a wide, beautiful smile–they don’t have much visibile angst or tension toward each other. Or if they do, it’s private. So watching them play each other feels drained of drama–they won’t let us in.

They aren’t the girls next door, or pin-up blondes. They are physical marvels in the tennis world–Venus is long and strong, and Serena is a tank, with the thighs of a fullback. Serena is also pretty in a conventional way, with a winning smile, and an ample bossom. She’s a bombshell trapped inside a weighlifters body. Certainly a long way from Tracy Austin. But what makes the Williams sisters great is their staying power. 

 Why aren’t they more popular? It’s a combination of many things, but there it is–the Williams sisters are holding up women’s tennis and somehow they are not huge celebrities here in the States.

The Williams girls played each other in the Wimbledon final on Saturday morning and Serena dispatched her older sister in straight sets giving her an 11-10 edge over Venus in head-to-head play. It was Serena’s third Wimbledon title, the first since 2002. She has the career Grand Slam–the Austrailian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open–winning 11 majors in all. Venus has won Wimbledon and the US Open, but hasn’t won a French or Austrialian Open. I got to wondering how Serena, the better of the two, stacks up against the greatest women tennis players of all-time.

She’s got a ways to go. Billie Jean King won 12 majors, Martina won 18 and Steffi Graf won 22.

Still, where would women’s tennis be today with out Serena and Venus?

Roger Federer is shooting for his record 15th major title this morning against Andy Roddick…

Roy Halladay will face the Yanks today (George Steinbrenner’s birthday) and looks to put a damper on the holiday festivities in the Bronx. It will be a tall task to beat him but stranger things have happened. It’s sunny and beauty-ful in New York.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Why is it that whenever I hear the name Eric Hinske, I automatically think of the “Penske File” from Seinfeld? Perhaps I’ve watched too many episodes of the show, or maybe I’ve just watched too much baseball, I’m not sure which. More to the point, I like the acquisition of the ex-Ray, Red Sock, and Blue Jay, mostly because he brings some much-needed power to a punchless bench. His left-handed swing should be well served at the new Stadium.

I also applaud the pickup of Hinske, acquired from the Pirates for two low level minor leaguers, because of his ability to spell Alex Rodriguez from time to time at third base. Hinske has recent experience at the position, having played three games there for the Pirates this year and eight games for the Rays in 2008. He doesn’t have much range, but his hands are good, as is a resume that includes several American League East pennant races and two World Series appearances.

Last year, Hinske platooned with the pennant-winning Rays, splitting his time between DH, right field, and left field. He’ll certainly play less often with the Yankees, backing up at the infield and outfield corners and coming off the bench to pinch-hit for the likes of Brett Gardner and Jose Molina (whenever he returns). That should bode well for the Yankees because Hinske is one of those players by which you can measure your ballclub. If he’s playing everyday for you, your team is probably not a pennant contender. But if he’s playing in a platoon role, or coming off the bench, as he will be doing for the Yankees, then that’s a sign that you have a good club…

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It wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t especially memorable, but the Yankees 4-2 win over the Blue Jays on Friday afternoon at Yankee Stadium was satisfying, a fine way to follow-up Thursday’s clunker. Roy Halladay will pitch the Yankee Doodle Dandy affair tomorrow, so today’s “w” was a good start to this four-game series.

AJ Burnett had good control and threw seven strong innings, allowing just two runs on six hits and a couple of walks.  His record is now 7-4 with a 3.83 ERA. The two Phils–Coke and Hughes, teamed-up to get three outs in the eighth and That Man Rivera, the old gunslinger, pitched a one-two-three ninth, striking out two batters. Robinson Cano and Alex Rodriguez hit solo homers to bookend the Yankee scoring–they got two more on a bases loaded walk and a wild pitch.

Just before Rodriguez homered into the right center field seats, I ate a couple of sour cherries that I bought last week. They were plump and juicy, like a fat grape, but the taste was pure cherry–tart and sour. It was almost carnal and I savored them as I watched the dinger. How sweet it is, I thought. It got even sweeter watching Rivera, the most graceful, elegant and efficient player I’ve had the pleasure to watch.

It doesn’t get old. In fact, Rivera is like a fine wine–each outing seems even sweeter now more than ever before. To think, he suffered blowing a save in Game 7 of the 2001 World Serious. That game could have finished a guy, buried his career, even a player of Rivera’s stature. Instead, he got better after that. He’s older, he’s given up some runs this year but he’s whiffed 42 batters in 33.2 innings. Oh yeah, he’s walked three guys.

Has any player ever given us Yankee fans the same feeling that Rivera has? I think not. He’s “the one.” We all know enough to be grateful. We’ll never see the likes of him again.

I’ve spoken with a few people recently who are jazzed-up to see Michael Mann’s new movie, Public Enemies. I admire Mann as a director though I find his movies humorless and grim. He makes serious-minded pulp. Public Enemies? Why not? I like a good genre movie as much as the next guy. Then I read a few reviews that were not impressed with the movie and figured, eh, I can skip it.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Manohla Dargis, who like the great Pauline Kael is prone to writing effusive, adoring reviews when she falls for a movie, has a different take:

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

…When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

I’m particularly curious about how the film looks. Richard Corliss thinks it comes off as cheap:

Shot and projected digitally instead of on film, the picture gains in gradations of night shades but loses in visual clarity. Some shots look like iPhone photos enlarged to 50 feet; any sharp camera movement results in a blur.

Is it ground-breaking or cheesy? Hmmm.

I watched last night’s game from the Todd Drew Memorial box high above home plate. It was a warm, muggy night. There was lightning and thunder before the game, which was delayed for thirty minutes, but just a few drops of rain. The Yanks were poised for a sweep but CC Sabathia offered up a stinker and the Yanks lost to the M’s 8-4. Sabathia just couldn’t put hitters away. He got to two strikes then then faltered. Franklyn Gutierrez, Kenji Johjima and Ryan Langerhans (5-6-7 in the order) hit the ball squarely against Sabathia each time up. Heck, even the lowly #8 hitter Chris Woodward had a couple of hits and a couple of RBI last night.

The Yanks scored four runs against Seattle’s starter, the slop-throwing Jason Vargas, who lasted all of four innings. But then Miguel Batista, Mark Lowe, and David Aardsma held them scoreless the rest of the way. Mark Teixeira made a throwing error and narrowly missed a line drive in the first inning off the bat of Ichiro, that wasn’t called an error, but from where we were sitting was a play he normally makes. Teix has been brilliant in the field this year but has made a few mistakes this week.

A game to forget for the Yankees. But at least I had the honor of watching them from Todd’s seats. This time I kept score and everything.

CC and the Yanks look to make it eight straight tonight. Rain could be a factor. Let’s hope it doesn’t mess with a nice winning streak.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

What’s the rumpus?

Over at the Baseball Analysts, Rich Lederer has a great post on the 50th anniversary of Vin Scully’s Greatest Call Ever.

Just go already. And enjoy.

A young woman sat next to me on the subway this morning. I asked her how the death of Michael Jackson has hit her.

“Does it make you feel nostalgic?”

“I don’t have time to be nostalgic.”

This is morbid but Jackson’s death spells big TV ratings and special commerative issues of magazines like Time and People. What other icons would generate this kind of reaction? Madonna? Paul McCartney? Tom Hanks? I suppose part of it would have to be someone dying young, or in an untimely fashion.

Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?

Good venue out in Brooklyn tonight:

Gelf’s Varsity Letters sports reading series returns on Thursday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m., with a night dedicated to baseball. At this free monthly event in DUMBO, Brooklyn, hosted by Gelf and Jan Larsen Art, Scott Price, Selena Roberts, and members of the New York Daily News sports investigative team will read from and talk about their work, and take questions. Price has the wrenching tale of the life and death of a minor-leaguer. Roberts will speak about her controversial biography of Alex Rodriguez. And the Daily News team will discuss its exposé of Roger Clemens and steroids in baseball.